Green Day reveal hit song was initially wrote for 5 Seconds Of Summer
Ahead of the release of Green Day’s new album Saviors, singer Billie Joe Armstrong revealed that he nearly offered a beloved Green Day fan track to Australian group 5 Seconds Of Summer.
As Green Day prepare to embark upon the next step of their career, Armstrong has looked back at their 2016 album Revolution Radio. The LP boasted the single ‘Still Breathing’, which the Green Day frontman has now stated was initially penned with the Australian pop-rock band in mind.
“There’s a band called 5 Seconds of Summer who wanted me to write a song for them,” he told People in a new interview. “All of a sudden I was writing the lyrics, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s no fucking way I’m giving these guys this song.’ There’s all those [lyrics] where it’s the last moment of someone’s life — it’s so intense. It’s just a song about being a survivor.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Armstrong discussed the poignancy behind ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ and ‘Boulevard Of Broken Dreams’, claiming the former was an exercise in “processing that loss [of his father] that I had with this person that I never really knew.”
Meanwhile, of the latter, Armstrong explained that “there can be all of this chaos going on around you, but ultimately you can find yourself pretty alone in the world.”
The singer also recently clarified the meaning behind Saviors‘ ‘Bobby Sox’, a song about his wife Adrienne and the nights they spend watching re-runs on the television. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he commented on how acceptance in the industry has changed: “Nowadays it’s more common for kids to be LGBTQ, and there’s more support. But for us, back in the day, that was like the beginning of when people were able to openly say things like that.”
When asked what he thought of the current moral panic over transgender people, Armstrong responded: “I just think they’re fucking close-minded. It’s like people are afraid of their children. Why would you be afraid? Why don’t you let your kid just be the kid that they are?”
Saviors is set for release on January 19th, 2024.
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